


Pratt Knot

by jerry_duty



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gift Giving, M/M, Terrible Courtship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-24 19:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14960999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerry_duty/pseuds/jerry_duty
Summary: “You laughed, when I said I was admiring it.”“It’s not wrapped or anything.”“No,” said Connor, “but it’s for me. I’ve never received a gift before. Thank you, Lieutenant Anderson.”





	Pratt Knot

**Author's Note:**

> David Cage is a terrible person and this is a terrible game.
> 
> With love, to robocops.

Someone had put a box on Connor’s desk at the precinct. The box was three degrees off-center and very narrow. Connor sat at the desk. He straightened the box so that it was perfectly centered. Then he folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward to look at the box. 

The usual morning chatter continued. The evening shift was clocking out as the day’s detectives trickled in. Connor logged the arrivals, the departures. The coffee was crap today. A mouse had left droppings outside the break room. Christ, this weather. The coffee’s always crap. Hey, Quinones, where’s that file? 

A series of footsteps: heavy stride, with a drag on the heel for each foot. The lieutenant loomed over Connor. 

“Well?”

Connor roused. He made a show of blinking. The blinking, as like waking from a nap, amused Hank. It pleased Connor to hear Hank’s snuffling rumble of a _ha_. He’d logged twenty-three unique variations on Hank’s laugh. The huh in his chest was Connor’s favorite. It flagged four memory files for Connor, each with positive annotations.

He tipped his head back to look up at Hank. Hank had a coffee in hand and a paper bag in the other hand. Sweet-sugar smell. Bear claws, glazed. 

“You gonna open it, or you waiting for it to jump up and bite you?”

Connor smiled. He said, “I was admiring it.”

Hank snorted at this and moved away to his own desk. The coffee steamed. He’d gone to the coffee shop at the end of the block. His knuckles were red-chapped from the wind. 

“Your hands are cold.”

Hank scoffed. Another vocalization: a different tonality, a variation of that _huh_ that sounded in his throat. “Aw, I just went around the corner.”

“If you’d remembered your gloves,” said Connor pointedly, “then your hands wouldn’t be cold.”

“My hands aren’t cold. See? I got coffee.” He hoisted the cup, both hands around it. “Nature’s own handwarmer. It’s the best part of waking up.”

Connor pressed his lips together and arched his eyebrows. 

“Just open the damn thing.”

“Please don’t think I’ll forget this,” said Connor.

“Y’know,” said Hank, “normally, when somebody gets you something, you say ‘thank you,’ and you tear into it, and you don’t ride their ass for leaving their gloves in their desk.”

“Am I meant to tear into the gift or into your ass?”

Hank hiccoughed into his coffee. “Jesus! There’s people around.” He mopped at the wet stain on his shirt. “Where the hell’re you learning these things?”

Connor widened his eyes and blinked again. “What things? I was only clarifying.”

“The hell you are,” Hank said. He muttered it into his coffee and so Connor was meant to pretend he did not hear this. Connor considered whether to continue to tease the lieutenant. He thought if he pressed again that Hank would begin to perspire near his ears. This often preceded vasodilation in his face. Connor liked to see the flush at odds with the grey of Hank’s beard, specifically when Hank was sober. It made him boyish. 

The lieutenant was correct. The day crew had arrived, for the most part. They had three ongoing cases to address, and Fowler was displeased with the slow progress on the oldest of the three. So Connor opted to show mercy.

“You laughed, when I said I was admiring it.”

“It’s not wrapped or anything.”

“No,” said Connor, “but it’s for me. I’ve never received a gift before. Thank you, Lieutenant Anderson.”

His shoulders hunched. He swiped at the keyboard on his desk. Connor fondly noted the lieutenant’s perpetually awful posture. Likely around the lieutenant’s usual lunch time, Connor would put out two aspirin, for his back. He would again suggest a massage. The lieutenant would again suggest Connor take his vibrating magic bullet hands elsewhere. 

“Don’t thank me. It’s really for me, so I don’t have to keep looking at that same black tie every day.”

Connor took the box in hand. He opened it. As he did so he said, “Customarily you’re supposed to keep the gift a surprise,” and neatly he laid the top of the box at a right angle to the desk’s edge. In the box was a tie. The tie was a pale blue cotton and polyester blend. Cartoon dogs in alternating yellow, pink, and green pastels checkered the cloth.

It was, according to all the season’s style trends and tips (that Connor instantaneously accessed and reviewed), nothing short of “an active assault on the senses and the eyes.” The fabric was shiny. The dogs were screen-printed. The colors did not match. It was, to Connor’s judgment, perfect. If asked he could not explain it. Only that each aspect of the tie triggered a positive feedback switch in his primary processor, culminating in Connor holding the tie aloft to better admire it under the light.

“Okay, you don’t have to Simba it,” said the lieutenant. His heartrate had picked up. He was sweating. “It’s just a tie.”

Connor was smiling. The fabric rasped very slightly against his synthskin.

“Fine. It’s tacky bullshit, and yeah, I got it on sale, but you try shopping Men’s Wearhouse on my salary—”

“Hank,” said Connor. “Thank you.” He lowered his hands. He could not stop smiling at the tie. He did not know why. The background processes he had been computing were shuttled now to standby so that he had more active memory to dedicate to recording this. 

“You’re uh.” Hank coughed. “You’re welcome.”

Very abruptly Connor stood up. The lieutenant grunted, surprised. Connor unknotted his tie. He wound the tail around his hand and stripped the tie in a single, smooth stroke. Hank made another startled sound. His heartrate had elevated again. Connor folded the black tie over and dropped it in a slithering pool on the desk. 

He dressed in the new tie, the tie that Hank had picked out for him, the tie that Hank had seen and that had reminded Hank of Connor or perhaps the tie that Hank had gone out to find for Connor. Connor twitched his toes with excitement. He had so many questions he wanted to ask the lieutenant. Why did he buy Connor the tie? Did he mean to buy Connor a gift or had it come upon him an impulse? What did the dogs mean to Hank? They meant happy things to Connor. Happy! He was happy. He wondered if this was what it felt like to Hank to drink. It made all of Connor’s processes feel frizzy, as if he were over-charged. 

Tugging the tail through, Connor tightened the knot to his throat.

Hank grumbled and said, “Look, you’re not—You’re doing it too tight. C’mere,” and so Connor went, bright-faced and frothing, to Hank who held his large, warm, callused hands up to Connor, yes, to Connor, who went. But Hank did not embrace him, and Connor was disappointed then he reminded himself that of course, they were at work and it was unprofessional to embrace in a place of business even if that was very suddenly of utmost urgency to Connor. 

“You’re gonna choke if it’s tied up like this.”

Hank’s head, bent to the knot. His hair was parted unevenly. A pale zigzag of scalp showed. He’d dandruff. Connor sniffed discreetly. He smelled: shampoo, the cheap kind. Neither whiskey nor beer. Cologne instead. He parsed out the chemical components then named the scent as orange flower, bergamot, mossy oak. 

Hank was methodical. His fingers moved steadily. Connor held still. He said, “I don’t need to breathe, lieutenant. So it would be impossible for me to choke.”

“Quit arguing,” said Hank. “All you ever do is argue. You ever think about just listening to me when I say something to you?” Coffee on his tongue. Bitter-harsh.

“Of course,” said Connor. “I remember everything you tell me, lieutenant. It’s only that as your partner, my job is to provide you with a different perspective.”

“All right, different perspectives. So why you gotta argue with me about the shit that’s not work?”

Connor thought about this. Hank had untied the knot entirely. Now he was retying it, in the opposite direction. His fingertips brushed across the upturned collar of Connor’s shirt. The delicate rubbing against the fabric seemed to resonate in Connor’s audial processing files: a false echo. His wrists were very warm. 

The fabric slipped against Connor’s throat. Connor said, slowly, “I suppose that… Because you listen to me when I talk, I like to talk to you.” He frowned fractionally. That seemed to simplify it.

“And who’s saying I’m listening?”

“Well, it’s obvious that you listen.” Connor touched the loose knot that Hank had made. His little finger brushed against the inside of Hank’s wrist. The arterial vein in the wrist pulsed hotly under the skin. “You saw this tie with its pattern of dogs and you thought of me.”

“Everybody likes dogs, Connor.”

Connor leaned in. He was helpless not to do so. He always wanted to be around Hank. Even before his programming had fractured, he had wanted to stand like this, the toes of his shoes touched to the toes of Hank’s shoes. 

He murmured, to the flakes of dried shampoo and dead skin still in the ragged part of Hank’s hair, with the interrogator’s crystallizing certainty: “But you didn’t think of them, lieutenant. You thought of me.”

Hank jerked the tie. He stepped back. He patted Connor in the center of his chest once, twice. His hand settled there, in the median of his breast plate. Hank was ruddy and scowling. Connor felt distantly at the tie. It was loose at his throat and slightly askew. Rakish, perhaps, was the angle. 

Connor looked at Hank, who glowered at him and snip-snap-growled, “What?”

“Well,” said Connor, “does it make me look good?”

Hank pushed off him. “Next time I’m gonna buy you a muzzle.”

Connor discarded several responses. They were none of them appropriate for the workplace. Besides, he was concerned Hank would overheat. The lieutenant’s ears were shiny with sweat. 

“I think of you, too, lieutenant,” he told Hank, and when Hank blustered at him, Connor only smiled at his most innocent. He put the black tie in the box, closed the box, and, tucking it under his arm, he joined Hank at his desk to begin the day. 

Periodically through the morning Connor would think, in a tertiary process, of Hank’s hands pulling the cloth of the tie through the loop he had made. The uneven edge of a fingernail, snagging microscopically in the fabric, leaving a burr so tiny only Connor could recognize it. 

Fowler wanted an update on the first case. Hank ate the bear claws and finished his coffee. He went to the bathroom twice. Connor put in a mobile order for a venti of the cinnamon coffee that Hank liked but rarely ordered. At 11:40:04AM he set out two aspirin on Hank’s desk alongside the cinnamon drink. Hank had not yet returned from his second trip to the bathroom. Connor straightened the pills then he paused. He looked at them. After a moment he reached down and set the right pill at a thirty degree angle from the left. He liked the way it looked. Rakish. So he left it like that. 

Hank returned. He was rubbing at the small of his back and yawning. “These old-ass chairs.”

“Would you like a massage, Hank?”

Hank snorted and swallowed the aspirin dry. “Ask me again later. Maybe you’ll get lucky.” He took a swig of the coffee. He stopped there with his cheeks pouched out. He sniffed at the lid as he swallowed. The lieutenant's mouth pulled at one corner, into something like a smile.

Connor said, teasing, “Maybe I will." He drew up the evidence reports from the second case on Hank’s computer and sat on the desk corner. Hank took the chair. The cinnamon fragrance blended nicely with his cologne. Connor was pleased.


End file.
